intros/long_intro.txt

# Document redaction

Redact personally identifiable information (PII) from documents (pdf, png, jpg), Word files (docx), or tabular data (xlsx/csv/parquet). Please see the [User Guide]({USER_GUIDE_URL}) for a full walkthrough of all the features in the app.
    
To extract text from documents, the 'Local' options are PikePDF for PDFs with selectable text, and OCR with Tesseract. Use AWS Textract to extract more complex elements e.g. handwriting, signatures, or unclear text. For PII identification, 'Local' (based on spaCy) gives good results if you are looking for common names or terms, or a custom list of terms to redact (see Redaction settings).  AWS Comprehend gives better results at a small cost.

Additional options on the 'Redaction settings' include, the type of information to redact (e.g. people, places), custom terms to include/ exclude from redaction, fuzzy matching, language settings, and whole page redaction. After redaction is complete, you can view and modify suggested redactions on the 'Review redactions' tab to quickly create a final redacted document.

NOTE: The app is not 100% accurate, and it will miss some personal information. It is essential that all outputs are reviewed **by a human** before using the final outputs.